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Lead Engineer
LDMSCardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Not disclosed
Salary
Not disclosed by employer
£51,900
Going rate
Skilled Worker going rate
This role may qualify for a Skilled Worker visa
SOC 2127 is an eligible occupation, but we classified this role with low confidence (49% match). If the code is right — and LDMS is a licensed sponsor — it should qualify, but double-check the occupation eligibility rules against the actual role.
About the role
Location: Cardiff
A senior technical leadership role where you'll lead and help shape the direction of greenfield systems at one of Europe's leading financial businesses.
About LDMS
Founded in 2018, LDMS is part of the LC Financial Holdings group, a three-pillar organisation with over 950 employees across Europe. Between us we have more than 20 years of world-class credit expertise.
We build digital lending software in a market growing around 18% a year. We want to lead that space, and to do it we need people who can think, create and challenge each other to find the best solutions for our customers. We have an ambitious to-do list: improving what we've built, building new products, and moving into new markets.
The Role
You'll join the Engineering team at LDMS as our Lead Engineer, reporting to an Engineering Team Lead. You'll be embedded in one team, but your technical influence will reach well beyond it. You will set the technical direction that the Senior Engineers around you build within and you are the person the wider department turns to for its more challenging technical decisions. Our stack is React and TypeScript on the frontend, Java with Spring Boot on the backend, and PostgreSQL with schema-per-tenant multi-tenancy underneath, all cloud-hosted on AWS. This is an opportunity to shape greenfield systems, not maintain legacy ones.
This is a technical leadership role, not a line-management one. Your focus is the long-term technical health and direction of a significant part of what we build. This includes the architecture, the standards, and the capability of the engineers working within your domain. You'll stay deeply hands-on and you'll be trusted to make the calls that are expensive to reverse.
Key Responsibilities
- Hybrid
A senior technical leadership role where you'll lead and help shape the direction of greenfield systems at one of Europe's leading financial businesses.
About LDMS
Founded in 2018, LDMS is part of the LC Financial Holdings group, a three-pillar organisation with over 950 employees across Europe. Between us we have more than 20 years of world-class credit expertise.
We build digital lending software in a market growing around 18% a year. We want to lead that space, and to do it we need people who can think, create and challenge each other to find the best solutions for our customers. We have an ambitious to-do list: improving what we've built, building new products, and moving into new markets.
The Role
You'll join the Engineering team at LDMS as our Lead Engineer, reporting to an Engineering Team Lead. You'll be embedded in one team, but your technical influence will reach well beyond it. You will set the technical direction that the Senior Engineers around you build within and you are the person the wider department turns to for its more challenging technical decisions. Our stack is React and TypeScript on the frontend, Java with Spring Boot on the backend, and PostgreSQL with schema-per-tenant multi-tenancy underneath, all cloud-hosted on AWS. This is an opportunity to shape greenfield systems, not maintain legacy ones.
This is a technical leadership role, not a line-management one. Your focus is the long-term technical health and direction of a significant part of what we build. This includes the architecture, the standards, and the capability of the engineers working within your domain. You'll stay deeply hands-on and you'll be trusted to make the calls that are expensive to reverse.
Key Responsibilities
These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:
Technical Direction
Technical Direction
- Own the long-term technical strategy for a core domain of the platform and drive the architectural work needed to get there, not just the next feature
- Produce the designs and reference architectures that other engineers build from with confidence and without rework
- Set and own the technical standards for your domain and lead Senior Engineers in applying them consistently
- Liaise with the Principal Engineers to keep your domain's technical strategy, tooling and patterns aligned with the wider technical direction
- Anticipate scaling, resilience, security and operability risks before they become incidents and drive best practice such as observability, security-by-design and robust testing
- Track where the industry is heading and judge, proactively, what is worth bringing into our stack
- Own delivery outcomes for large, complex pieces of work and keeping momentum through ambiguity and changing requirements
- Influence roadmap prioritisation based on technical risk, complexity and strategic value, not just delivery execution
- Identify systemic delivery problems and drive structural fixes, rather than working around them
- Make sound, defensible decisions with incomplete information and model the delivery discipline you expect of others
- Raise the technical capability of Senior Engineers working within your domain through design leadership, review and pairing
- Build standards, patterns and a culture of technical excellence that persist and compound after any single project ends
- Have visible, structural impact beyond your immediate team, influencing how other teams work or what they build
- Work with Engineering Management on department-level strategy and standards and shape the engineering hiring bar and team culture
Communication and Influence
Essential
- Communicate technical strategy clearly to engineers, product, and business stakeholders
- Produce written work such as design documentation, RFCs and proposals that shifts how the organisation thinks and drives alignment across teams
- Influence other teams and resolve significant disagreements through reasoning and trust, without needing to escalate
- Build an external technical profile through conferences, open source, or industry community, in ways that raise our reputation and help us attract talent
- Encourage open technical discussion and build active engineering communities across our main communication channels
- Trial new tools and technologies, including AI and embed the ones that help into how the team works day to day, while being honest about their limits
- Set the standards for how the team uses AI, codifying our patterns and guardrails into the tooling itself so that AI-assisted work stays consistent, secure and high quality as it scales
- Lead by example in day-to-day development with AI coding tools such as Claude, using them to move faster while holding the bar on design quality, security and maintainability
Essential
- Deep, hands-on expertise in Java (preferably Java 25+) with strong command of Spring Boot
- Strong relational database skills, ideally PostgreSQL, including schema design, migrations and working with data at scale
- A track record of setting technical direction for a domain or service area, with decisions that proved sound and were rarely reversed
- Experience raising the capability of a team of engineers, not just mentoring individuals, but lifting the standard of the group
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical delivery of complex, ideally greenfield systems over sustained periods
- Experience introducing AI coding tools such as Claude into an engineering team effectively
- An understanding of the demands of building software in a financial environment
- Exposure to React and TypeScript, enough to make sensible cross-cutting decisions in a full-stack team
- Familiarity with tools such as Keycloak for identity and AWS S3 for storage
Our passion is tech, but the people we bring together are the heart of the business. Over the years we've recruited a fairly eclectic bunch, with hobbies from gaming to ultra-marathon running, snowboarding to chess, hiking to climbing. What we share are our values:
- Teamwork
- Merit
- Develop
- Honest
- Impactful
- Integrity
They might look like corporate jargon, but they mean something to us. If they sound like you, get in touch. There's a good chance you'd be a great fit.
Benefits
Benefits
- Discretionary bonus*
- 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
- Opportunity to purchase additional annual leave
- 1 day birthday leave
- 1 day charity leave
- Private health insurance
- Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
- Season ticket loan for transport
- Eye care
- Pension (3% / 5% contribution)
- Salary sacrifice schemes (cycle to work and electric vehicle)
- Monthly socials
- Charity events
- The discretionary bonus will be pro-rata'd during your first year with the Company
This description is the source posting as it read when we added it. We are not affiliated with LDMS, so check their own site for the current details.
Where this offer sits in the market
SOC 2127 · UK · ONS ASHE 2025 · ~62k in sampleP25 £43kP75 £67k
£36kmedian £53kgoing rate £52k£67k
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Does this job guarantee visa sponsorship?
Not necessarily. LDMS holds a sponsor licence, but sponsorship for a specific hire is always the employer's decision. Be upfront in your application that you'll require it.
What salary is needed for this role to be eligible?
The offer must clear both the general threshold and the SOC 2127 going rate of £51,900. New-entrant and shortage discounts can lower it.